The Halloween Creatures Book Tag
Rules: Answer all prompts. Answer honestly. Tag 1-13 people. Link back to this post. ( For me it was SnoopyDoo!) Remember to credit the creator. (Anthony @ Keep Reading Forward)< Have fun! Witch A Magical Character or Book Terry Pratchett’s witches, particularly Granny Weatherwax. And DEATH (preferably in his Hogfather incarnation). No contest. […]
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Patricia Moyes: The Sunken Sailor
I read Moyes’s first Henry & Emmy Tibbett book (Dead Men Don’t Ski) earlier this year and liked it a lot. While I still liked most of book 2 as well, The Sunken Sailor (aka Down Among the Dead Men) suffers from a bit of a sophomore slump: Moyes first does a great job establishing […]
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Kathryn Harkup: Death by Shakespeare
Hmmm. After having read and liked — though not loved — Harkup’s book on Agatha Christie’s use of poisons in her mysteries (A Is for Arsenic), it took the Shakespeare fan in me about a millisecond to snatch up this third book of hers when I came across it earlier this year … only to […]
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Christianna Brand: Fog of Doubt
Brand’s fifth Inspector Cockrill mystery, and of all the books by her that I have read (all of them this year), second only to Green for Danger, which remains my favorite among all of her novels. Brand specialized in closed circle mysteries, and apart from the traditional country house settings so prevalent in Golden Age […]
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Aimee and David Thurlo: Second Sunrise
Native American police procedural meets vampires, witches and werewolves. To give the authors their due, I guess with skinwalkers being a key part of Navajo mythology, it’s a proximate thought to capitalize on the past decade(s)’ vampire craze and go full tilt supernatural / paranormal, and the sequence of events that turns our protagonist into […]
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Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
This is a book from my Around the World project / reading list: the story of Lillian, a young woman of Caribbean descent who returns to her home island of Dominica in order to lay to rest the ghosts of her family history, which has been troubled ever since her grandmother — rumored to be […]
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Anthony Gilbert: Death in Fancy Dress
This book is probably best described as “Golden Age country house mystery meets Wuthering Heights“. Lucy Beatrice Malleson was a member of the Detection Club who wrote under several pen names, including Anne Meredith and Anthony Gilbert, and reading her books almost a century after they were first published, it is hard to believe that […]
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Halloween Bingo 2020: The Second Week (+1 Day)
Posting this on Monday instead of Sunday again … oh well. I guess after a near-phenomenal first bingo week it was only to be expected that the second week would not be quite as fabulous. Mind you, I’m not complaining — my card is coming together nicely, and none of the books I read this […]
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Nicholas Blake: The Beast Must Die
Wow. What a stunner. Blake (aka Cecil Day Lewis) messes with the reader’s mind literally from page 1, and being fully aware of the fact still doesn’t mean you’ll be up to what he is doing — or at least not all of it. Even to begin talking about the plot would mean giving away […]
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Margery Allingham: More Work for the Undertaker
The thirteenth book in the Campion series; one of the few I hadn’t read yet and thus, a proximate choice for the “13” bingo square. In tone, I find that the post-WWII stories are markedly darker than the series’s very first entries, which by and large is all to the good, however; even if they […]
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Joy Ellis: They Disappeared
Before starting this book, I’d said I hoped Ellis was done with the serial killer plots, as I had a feeling she was at risk of turning into a one trick pony that way — well, let’s say I both did and didn’t get my wish. (Several gruesome deaths, yes, but not a mentally diseased […]
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Michael Connelly: The Night Fire
My bingo pre-read and a very welcome return to Los Angeles — or at least, the version thereof that constitutes the world of Connelly’s characters, which however only ends up making the city a major character of its own in addition to the humans living in it. Harry Bosch may not officially be a cold […]
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Halloween Bingo 2020: The First Week (+1 Day)
This year’s Halloween Bingo started a lot more promising than last year’s with a strong joint entry in Michael Connelly’s Bosch and Ballard series, and in fact, not one of the books I read earned less than a four-star rating — with the standout being Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die, which turned out to […]
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Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other
Not a proper review, just a short note to say … Heaven knows the Booker jury doesn’t always get it right IMHO, but wow, this time for once they absolutely did. If you haven’t already read this, run, don’t walk to get it. And though initially I was going to say “especially if you’re a […]
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Ian Doescher: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars — Verily, a New Hope
Verily, a Great Entertainment “CHORUS: As our scene to space, so deep and dark, O’er your imagination we’ll hold sway. For neither players nor the stage can mark The great and mighty scene they must portray. We ask you, let your keen mind’s eye be chief – Think when we talk of starships, there they […]
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Ruth Rendell: A Judgement in Stone
DNF @ 30% (approx) “Illiterate” (read: dyslexic) working class home help kills her well-meaning but utterly clueless upper class employers. The end. (And because it’s an inverted mystery, we know literally from the first sentence that this is going to happen.) Aaaannnd … I’m out. I’m not merely bored, though. Chiefly, I’m furious at […]
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Dorothy L. Sayers: Busman’s Honeymoon
A Lethal Play, or, Sayers’s Last Word on Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane “PETER (frowns): You know, Harriet, this is one of those exasperatingly simple cases. I mean, it’s not like those ones where the great financier is stabbed in the library – HARRIET: I know! And thousands of people stampede in and out […]
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Val McDermid: Broken Ground
So what happened at the end there, Val? Why that infernal rush? Did you suddenly become aware that you were on your way towards producing a minor brick, or did your publisher tell you to cut it short? There we were, sailing nicely along in the usual 4-stars-or-higher bracket into which this series typically falls […]
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Georgette Heyer: No Wind of Blame
Well, this rather improved on me quite a bit upon a reread! I still love the humor (for once, virtually without the sarcasm that is present in so many of Heyer’s other books), Vicky and her mother are pure sparks of joy, and I even remembered the solution (though definitely not all the technical bits, […]
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Patricia Wentworth: Miss Silver Comes to Stay
Yes — Still a Favorite I’m getting to the point where I’m beginning to revisit “Miss Silver” books because I’ve read almost all the books in the series at least once. (There are only some five or so books left that I’ve yet to read for the first time.) So I figured, I might just […]
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